To the Editors - Letter to the Editor

Commonweal, Sept 8, 2000 by Garry Wills, Eamon Duffy, James B. Lloyd, Shawn Zeller

Newman's own

With regard to Eamon Duffy's review of my Papal Sin [July 14], I find it difficult to take seriously anyone who defends the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. And regarding Newman's attitude toward criticizing the papacy--I have never wished that the pope would die before doing much harm to the church, but Newman felt "obliged" to: "We must hope, for one is obliged to hope, that the pope will be driven from Rome, and will not continue the council, or that there will be another pope. It is sad that he should force us to such wishes" (August 21, 1870). And I have never called the pope a tyrant, but Newman called him a climactic, a godlike tyrant: "We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a pope to live twenty years...he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know his facts, and does cruel things without meaning it" (November 18, 1870). Eamon Duffy should hate Newman's words.

GARRY WILLS
Evanston, Ill.

The reviewer replies:

When a reviewer has had his say about a book, by and large he should thereafter hold his peace. But one point in Garry Wills's response to my review of Papal Sin goes to the heart of what is amiss with the book, and demands clarification. I did not of course "defend" the barbarous alienation of Edgardo Mortara from his parents, and I share Wills's civilized sense that the whole shabby incident is yet another example of the church's immemorial hostility toward the people of the Messiah. But it is one thing to recognize that the pope's handling of the Mortara case was tragically wrong, and quite another to assume, as Wills does, that the morality of the situation should or could have appeared to a nineteenth-century Italian priest of Pio Nono's limited intelligence and narrowness of formation in the same light and with the same clarity as it does to us, who stand on this side of the Holocaust.

The past is another country, and travel, they say, broadens the mind. But only if we are empathically alert to difference. The historian has no business stamping around his subject matter like an outraged tourist, denouncing the sanitary arrangements and berating the low morals of the natives. The popes in Wills's book are caricatures, men driven by a single motive, the aggrandizement of their office. But people, the past, the church, are all more complicated than that, and the historian does his readers no service by parading a gallery of grotesques to "prove" an overarching thesis. Newman was repelled by this same dogmatic sermonizing in Wills's other hero, Acton, and his refusal to climb into Acton's pulpit led the great historian to denounce Newman privately as "the great Sophist," the "artful deceiver" who, by apologizing for the unforgivable, "does the Devil's work best." Acton, arguably, knew more about the past than Newman, but I for one do not doubt that Newman's principled reticence in the face of the massive human and divine complexity of the church was a more authentic intuition.

EAMON DUFFY

Courage & chastity

The article "Dignity's Challenge" [July 14] reports that Father Peter Liuzzi of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles says that the policy of the church-approved group Courage is to help gay men "grow into heterosexuality." It is difficult to know where he got this impression since Courage defines its primary goal as "helping...to live in accord with the Catholic church's teaching on chastity." There is no policy of pushing or urging people into heterosexuality. As a practicing and licensed psychologist and a five-year facilitator in the Courage ministry, I am astounded at the misinformation floating around the contemporary Catholic scene. The last time I looked, chastity was everyone's obligation, and the use of the sexual faculty was restricted exclusively to heterosexual unions in lawful marriage. The Courage people are too sophisticated and knowledgeable to hold the monocular goal ascribed to them by Father Liuzzi's statement.

(REV.) JAMES B. LLOYD C.S.P.
New York, N.Y.

The policy of Courage

In "Dignity's Challenge" by Shawn Zeller, the message of Courage is grossly distorted. Zeller writes that Courage "is banned from some dioceses, which feel it treads too closely to the reparative therapy endorsed by some evangelical Protestants." Zeller quotes Father Peter Liuzzi who claims that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles bans Courage because it has a policy "of working to help gay men grow into heterosexuality" and this policy is "risky because these men may marry, only to find that they still harbor homosexual desires."

Both Zeller and Liuzzi have seriously misrepresented the purpose of Courage, which is to teach men and women with same-sex attractions to lead a life of interior chastity through prayer, group support, and chaste friendships (Courage handbook). There is not a word in our handbook about "becoming heterosexual."

At the same time, Courage may not deny the right of the individual to seek therapy to move as far away as possible from the homosexual condition which the church calls an "objective disorder."